Rare Usa-China w.
this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2026
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So which one is the first floor you encounter when you enter the building? Do you normally climb a ladder to get in your house, or do you enter your house on the ground floor? Is the ground floor the first floor you encounter when you enter or is it not?
If you take the stair down from the ground floor, the second floor you see is the basement top level. Do you call that the second floor then? Is the order of floors decided by the first guy that walked into the building with floor numbers (after they forgot the 0 sign ofc). Does the floor numbering for each building depend on whether they wanted to start upwards or downwards that day?
Your 'first floor you see' way of thinking only holds up for the ground floor. Meanwhile just pure rational (mathematical even) +/- X from ground floor is logic all the way around
Yes, but that thinking does hold up for that case. If it really bothers you that people take different paths through buildings, then the answer is to strictly stop naming floors sequentially (third floor, fourth floor, …) and only index them (floor 3, floor 4, …). In that case, floor 0 can be wherever you want.
Which floor you encounter 2nd in a building will depend on if you go up or down, sure, but for most buildings, every single person will have the same first floor they enter. It’s ridiculous to have something called the “first floor” that is literally no one’s first floor when there’s a floor that everyone has to enter first.
If you've got a building that has only basement levels aside from the ground floor, I feel like the first basement level being the "second floor" is completely valid. The reason we usually use a different system for basement floors is because there's already a second floor that isn't the first basement level.
If we want to be purely mathematically rational then we're either using the US system where the ground floor is the first floor or we're using the Russian system where the ground floor is floor 0. Either way, we need to acknowledge that the ground floor is the start of the count. You can't just say it's not a floor because it happens to be the place where you entered.